I was a drug counselor and one of the kids I was working with called me at 11 one night and asked if I could come down to his job because he said there was a lot of blow around. So I went down and, as it turned out, the kid was working as a PA on a movie set. It was the film Runaway Train with John Voight and Eric Roberts. You have to understand that this was 1985, and on movie sets you could walk into production and cocaine lines were right there on the table. It wasn’t even hidden. It was unbelievable.

So I’m there and this guy comes up to me and asks if I’d like to be an extra and I was like, ‘an extra what?’ And he said, ‘Can you act like a convict?’ I thought it was a joke. I did 11 years in prison, so I said, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ (laughs).

They gave me this blue shirt to wear and so I take off my shirt and this guy sees my tattoo and comes over to me and says ‘You’re Danny Trejo.’ I look at him and say ‘You’re Eddie Bunker.’ We were in prison together. I had first met him in 1962 then met him again in ’65 and then on the set of the movie. He was the screenwriter for the film!

So he says to me ‘Hey, Danny, I can get you the job of teaching Eric Roberts how to box. It pays $320 a day’ And I said, ‘How badly do you want me to beat this guy up?“ For $320 I thought they wanted me to kick some guy’s ass. I’d do it for $50. But he said to me, ‘No, no, no, this actor is really high strung. He might sock you. He’s already socked a couple of people.’ Eric was real high strung in those days. So I said, ‘Eddie, for $320 you can give him a stick!’

So I started teaching Eric how to box, and Eric wasn’t too sure about me (laughs), so he did whatever I told him to do. The director, Andrei Konchalovsky, who had a lot of problems with him just said, ‘Hey, you be in this movie,’ and the rest is history.